I Am the Lizard King, I Can Say Anything

United Russia Councillor Suggests Ural Villagers Send Children to Boarding School Due to Lack of BusMediazona
January 27, 2020

In Sverdlovsk Region, Lyudmila Boronina, a member of the Polevskoy Urban District Council, suggested that residents of the village of Krasnaya Gorka send their children to a boarding school since the village does not have its own school or a bus to take children to Polevskoy, the nearest town. Boronina’s remarks were quoted by the newspaper Vechernye Vedomosti.

As the newspaper writes, on January 21, the council’s committee on social policy discussed educational issues, including the fact that there are few regular buses to Polevskoy from Krasnaya Gorka, forcing children to walk four kilometers along the highway to school. Boronina, who took part in the discussion, works at the Center for Culture and Folk Art and coordinates United Russia’s Strong Families project.

“Let’s recall the good old Soviet times: we had a system of boarding schools for children from rural areas. Children were brought to school on Monday morning and picked up on Saturday evening. We have a remedial school in the district. It is temporarily under repairs, but the district owns the building, and it is heated. Maybe we could consider a boarding school for rural children whose parents are not able to drive them to school?” Boronina said at the committee meeting.

Maxim Bestvater, a spokesman for the regional branch of the United Russia party, told the website Nakanune.RU that the proposal was far from perfect and would probably not be implemented since it had been met with hostility.

Bestvater urged people not to compare Boronina with Olga Glatskikh, as their remarks were of a “different caliber.”

As director of the Sverdlovsk region’s youth policy department, Glatskikh met with teenagers in Kirovgrad in 2018. She told them that the state basically did not owe them anything, but their parents did. She also said that the state had not asked their parents to have them. Glatskikh’s department was soon abolished, and she herself resigned.

Translated by the Russian Reader

Why do I translate and post stories like this? There are several reasons. First, because seemingly unimportant dispatches from the Russian back of beyond punch big holes in the myth of the “stability and prosperity” supposedly enjoyed by people in the nonexistent “Russian heartlands” under Putin. If I had the time, the money, and some extra help, I could churn out dozens of posts a day, all of them from places other than Moscow and Petersburg (although they are not immune to these problems, either) showing the staggering instability and immiseration the regime has visited upon villages and towns like Krasnaya Gorka and Polevskoy. Second, the fact that stories like this one are widely reported in Russian media and hotly discussed in Russian social media complicates the simplified picture of Russia as a country with no independent media or civil society. Third, they show how an authoritarian-populist regime functions in the twenty-first century—by “welcoming” certain limited, localized expressions of public discontent, thus deflecting attention away from the decision-making elites in the capitals and their overawing responsibility for the “minor apocalypses” that have been unfolding for decades in the provinces. Given Putin’s new “social turn,” as outlined in his recent state of the nation speech, it will be interesting to see what contradictions and collisions are sparked as the mafia state pretends to put on a more human face. [trr]